Sadaharu Horio

Sadaharu Horio joined the Japanese post-war group, Gutai Art Association, in 1966 and has been expanding on Gutai’s avant-garde spirit with an impressive body of experimental work. He is a pioneer in modern Kobe performance art and his influence on Japan’s contemporary art scene is significant.

Highly prolific, original and energetic, he creates numerous paintings and drawings in a short period time with great intensity. Horio creates or performs whatever comes into his mind. There’s no hesitation or change after the work is done. The performative, spontaneous aspects of his work, as well as the energy, freedom and openness of the process, strongly associate his works with the Gutai spirit. One can expect infinite possibilities.

Horio’s focus is on praxis. He organises about one hundred exhibitions and performances each year, which reinforces the idea that the exhibition is not a special moment for him but rather an extension of his everyday living. As Horio would describe it: “Everything ordinary or unaffected is basically a performance.” In his performances, Horio constantly challenges his audience’s ideas about art, deconstructing the idea of a product-based outcome and enhancing the meaning of critical artistic practice.

Horio’s work seeks to capture the moment and preserve it in time. The Japanese expression, “Ichi-go-ichi-e” describes the originality of a single moment. “One encounter. One chance.” Each moment is unique and cannot be copied nor reproduced. Horio creates works of art in a manner that is totally free and without any fear, effacing his ego entirely, like a child. The meaning of creation is not related to usefulness, intellect or consciousness. His practice is not about understanding something, but encountering something new and being truthful to the specific moment in time. The speed in the process enables the ability to capture the present time and space. He visualises impermanence and tells us we should live in the now.

Horio’s unbridled enthusiasm and boundless energy of challenging both audience and art institution is as inspiring today as when the Gutai group was first founded. The Japanese phrase, “atarimae no koto” (a matter of course), explains his artistic concepts and working methods quite well. He collects various found objects and mediums that he finds in his surroundings, everything from scraps of metal to pieces of wood and even junk, in order to use them as surfaces on which to paint. He undertakes this task daily as an ever-repeating ritual. To avoid making the choice of colour himself, he sticks to the sequence of colours in the paint box. He thereby avoids everything that is connected with subjectivity, because what he does could be done just as well by anyone else and could be endlessly continued.

His works help us discover how meaningful and beautiful the ordinary, banal objects surrounding us can be. Art becomes something we can experience or create anytime, and in any situation.